Interesting panel on AI investing, which has some good call-outs with respect to bias in data and the importance of diverse teams working on this stuff.
Dispatches From The Internets
Investing in AI, with Care
Automate Netlify Redirects in 11ty
I found this post really helpful in porting my old Jekyll front matter-based redirects (which use the redirect_from key) to Eleventy & Netlify.
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web
There is so much to unpack in this piece, but it offers a really helpful metaphor for understanding Large Language Models.
This excerpt, in particular, really hit me… hard. Using AI to generate content and put it on the web would eventually result in a huge reduction of quality, just like making a photocopy of a photocopy:
Even if it is possible to restrict large-language models from engaging in fabrication, should we use them to generate Web content? This would make sense only if our goal is to repackage information that’s already available on the Web. Some companies exist to do just that—we usually call them content mills. Perhaps the blurriness of large-language models will be useful to them, as a way of avoiding copyright infringement. Generally speaking, though, I’d say that anything that’s good for content mills is not good for people searching for information. The rise of this type of repackaging is what makes it harder for us to find what we’re looking for online right now; the more that text generated by large-language models gets published on the Web, the more the Web becomes a blurrier version of itself.
Netflix wants to chop down your family tree
This piece is incredibly disheartening, but it points out the importance of inclusive design.
Ten modern layouts in one line of CSS
Una did a great job in putting together this simple, but highly useful resource. If you struggle with Flexbox & Grid, this is a great place to start.
High Definition CSS Color Guide
Adam really outdid himself putting this resource together. It’s everything you’d want to know about high definition color systems… and then some.
The Market for Lemons
So much of this piece resonates with me. I’ve been there, alongside Alex, since the early days of JavaScript libraries and borne witness to the deception and misdirection from those in the “JavaScript all the things” camp.
[W]e need to move our attention back to the folks that have been right all along. The people who never gave up on semantic markup, CSS, and progressive enhancement for most sites. The people who, when slinging JS, have treated it as special occasion food. The tools and communities whose culture puts the user ahead of the developer and hold evidence of doing better for users in the highest regard.
See also:
On Dependency
Nearly three years on, this piece from Rob still resonates deeply with me.
I have no illusions about being some kind of lone wolf. All the stuff I’m making “by hand”—the way it approaches form, function, and materials—has been informed by philosophies and techniques developed by an amorphous community that spans generations. This work proliferates through byzantine open source projects, yes, but it also proliferates through books, blog posts, and videos with titles like “Custom Styling Form Inputs With Modern CSS Features.” When I’m making things, that’s how I prefer to depend on others and have them depend on me: by sharing strong, simple ideas as a collective, and recombining them in novel ways with rigorous specificity as individuals.
Rebuilding a PHP App using Isomorphic JavaScript with Eleventy & Netlify
Back in the early days of the iPhone, I created Tipr, a tip calculator that always produces a palindrome total. This is an overview of the minimal work I did to make it a modern web app that can run without a traditional back-end.
In 2023, Resolve to Fix Your Organization’s Meta Pixel Problem – The Markup
It’s hard to believe it’s 11 years after I wrote about dropping 3rd party share links & such to protect your users’ privacy and we’re still having to have this conversation. You need to get rid of the Facebook/Meta pixel. And if you can’t do it everywhere, at least do remove it from pages with sensitive content. Don’t sell out your users!